Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Watch brown bears catch salmon in Katmai National Park on a live webcam:
Every year over a hundred Brown Bears descend on a mile long stretch of Brooks River to feast on the largest Sockeye Salmon run in the world.
— bears: brown bear & salmon cam – brooks falls on explore.org
The EPA’s student resource page has a few interesting publications on the life cycles of a few common products: CD/DVD’s, cell phones, and soccer balls.
They’re a bit noisy, and would probably benefit from being reproduced in a more interactive format (Flash maybe), but they’re still a useful resource for talking about life cycles.
They’re a less dramatic presentation which can supplement the advocacy of the Story of Stuff video.
Plastic bottles take 100 years to break down; styrofoam cups – fifty years; aluminum cans – 200 years; glass bottles, which are made of silica, just like the beach’s white sand – who knows. So we took a little time out of our adventure trip to collect anthropogenic debris as we walked along the beach on Deer Island.
We picked up stuff on our way out, so we were able to enjoy the fruits of our labours on our walk back to the landing point.
The degradation times for marine garbage can be found on the SOEST website, but That Danny has an interesting compilation of data that tries to reconcile the different degradation times you can find on the web.
In 1900 fish stocks in the North Atlantic looked like this:
IN the year 2000, fish stocks looked like this:
There are more data and visualizations on the European Ocean2012.eu site.
Just in time for us to learn about global change, this interesting study on the expanding range of brown recluse spiders came out. Once restricted to the southern U.S. and the midwest, future climate change will allow them to expand north to Minnesota and east into Pennsylvania.
The researchers, Saupe et al. (2011), used ecological niche modeling. This method takes known information about where the spiders live, such as climate (e.g. summer temperatures) or topography (e.g. mountains versus plains), to figure out the current extent of their ecological niche. Then they use climate models to figure out where those same conditions will apply in the future. Thus the spiders march north.
While we were working on the needs of living things a couple weeks ago, we acquired two fish; goldfish, fifteen cents apiece.
It was supposed to only be a mental exercise. If you put a water plant, Egeria densa in this case, in an enclosed jar and left it in the sunlight, the plant should use the carbon dioxide in the water to produce oxygen during photosynthesis. A similar jar kept in the dark would produce carbon dioxide and use oxygen as the plant respired.
That was the practical part. Students measure the pH of the water before and after a day in the light and dark. The pH of the jar in the dark should go down as the added carbon dioxide makes the water slightly more acidic. Bromthymol blue solution in the water changes color very nicely within the pH range of this experiment, but, in a pinch, you can also use the pH color strips that are sold for testing aquarium water.
My students did the experiment, made their observations and came to conclusions. Then the lab activity asked them to think about what would happen if you put a fish into each of the jars, to see if students are able to extrapolate based on a well rounded knowledge of respiration and photosynthesis.
My students did the mental experiment, but the next day our two fish turned up, uninvited at least by me.
I’d anticipated something like this so I’d picked up a small fish tank at a yard sale over the summer. I’m not opposed to keeping animals in the classroom, as long as I don’t have to take care of them. Fortunately, since we’re studying life, keeping organisms and attending their needs is something the kids are learning and there is no better way to learn that via practice.
Our fish are surviving. The students have added some gravel and structures to provide habitat. The waterplants, still in there to provide oxygen, seem to be thriving despite some browsing by the goldfish.
One of the few rules is that anything added to the tank should have some purpose to help support the needs of the fish. I’m also encouraging the students to think of ways of maintaining conditions in the tank which would minimize their work. Hopefully some filter feeders, maybe small clams, and similar organisms will turn up and we can talk about ecology. I may have to nudge them in that direction though.
I’m not sure what the fish’s names are as there seems to be some controversy among the students. With a little luck they’ll survive until we start comparing religions. Two years ago we had a frog who passed away at just the right time for us to have to figure out what religion he/she was so we could perform last rites.
And no, I did not kill the frog.
I’ve been thinking about science fiction, like Mirable and The Chrysalids that tie into the Natural World (science) curriculum. While I’ve not read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars triology, Red Mars, Blue Mars and Green Mars, they’ve won a number of awards and I’ve heard good things about them.
I’m looking for books that address global ecology, so stories about terraforming Mars would seem to fit. The Mars triology books are also supposed to be fairly rigorous and consistent about the science, something I look for in good science fiction. There are also some good articles discussing the science that can be used for supporting information, like this one by Margarita Miranova (2008) about the actual feasibility of terraforming Mars.
Given Mars’ proximity and the fact that space agencies have orbiting satellites and ground rovers makes the idea of colonizing Mars an intriguing one for the more adventurous adolescents. In fact, the recent news that 7th graders discovered a new feature on Mars’ surface might also inspire some interest. The 7th graders’ project was part of the Mars Student Imaging Program (MSIP), which might also be of interest. MSIP actually allows students to use the camera on board the Mars Odyssey satellite, by identifying locations for detailed images.
